The present invention provides protocols for automatic positioning and generation of a wax guard protection system for hearing instruments. The system is designed to interface with a feature recognition module, such as that described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,605,812, entitled, “Intelligent Modeling Method and System for Earmold Shell and Hearing Aid Design”, issued on Oct. 20, 2009 to McBagonluri et al, herein incorporated by reference.
In general, a wax guard is a structure on the tip of a hearing aid shell used to protect the electronic components inside the shell from the wax entering from the patient's ear. Wax Guard systems are added to a large percentage of in-the-ear (ITE) hearing instrument products produced today, and many of the existing hearing instruments have some sort of wax protection systems associated with them. These systems are usually engineered to fit comfortably on most impressions and are empirically generated mostly by trial and error within 3D modeling media.
Different types of wax guard systems currently exist in the hearing instruments industry, and include flip tops, Philips, open wax, and bell bores; these systems are usually implemented as a sculptural modification to the impression. Other types of wax systems are not sculptured onto the impression but rather are added to the impression as a 3D dimensional object designed externally and added to the hearing instrument. In certain instances both types of wax system are mutually used together. This present invention focuses on the former, where the implementation is adaptive to a given instrument.